When will Inter Miami open their Miami stadium already? An investimagation

With the book finally closed on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium saga, the longest-running stadium campaign in Florida is now likely that of Inter Miami, which goes back 11 years, to a time before the team even existed. After innumerable twists and turns, team owners David Beckham and Jorge Mas finally got approval in 2018 to build a privately funded stadium on a public golf course, then a year later went and built a temporary stadium in Fort Lauderdale to play in in the interim.

All of which brings us to this week, when team execs announced that the Miami stadium, set to open next year, will not actually open next year, which will instead be the “final season” in Fort Lauderdale. In fact, construction hasn’t even yet begun:

In 2023, Inter Miami Managing Owner Jorge Mas said, “I can’t wait to welcome our fans to our state-of-the-art stadium and hear the chants as Messi and your Inter Miami players take the pitch for the first time in 2025.” However, despite Mas’ promise to fast-track the project, construction crews are still working on clearing the land, and the building of the stadium structure has not yet begun…

After reviewing the progress made to date, stadium expert Denys Schwartz, who worked on the Maracana Stadium project, said, “Based on previous experience, I believe it might take from 24 to 30 months to reach project completion if the construction progress is accelerated.”

Sooooo, 24-30 months from now puts us at somewhere between August 2026 and February 2027, which would mean that next season would decidedly not be the final season in Fort Lauderdale. (It could be the final full season there, maybe, if Inter moved to its new stadium mid-2026.)

But more important, is this thing even getting built at all? From this video from two weeks ago, it looks like a bit more has been done than land clearance: There’s some compacting of the soil being done, plus what looks like some rebar in the ground to serve as the foundation for the stadium. So it’s in progress, albeit in the very, very early stages, which makes a 24-30 month timeline pretty reasonable.

Inter Miami fans, meanwhile, are steamed that they were suckered into buying season tickets on the promise that they would get to watch Lionel Messi in “the inaugural season at Miami Freedom Park,” which now will not happen unless Messi signs a contract extension for 2026, when he will turn 39 years old, which is very old for a soccer player, even arguably the greatest one of all time playing in a league that is not at all the greatest of all time. Could Mas and Beckham pull this same trick again, staying put in Fort Lauderdale for all or most of the 2026 season, while forcing fans to keep their season tickets active in order to get first dibs on seats at the new stadium in 2027? There’s no way to tell for sure, but given past history, yeah, probably.

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8 comments on “When will Inter Miami open their Miami stadium already? An investimagation

  1. Cleaning a superfund site (which this is) requires putting some physical barrier in place. The rebar in the video could still be related to that. Perhaps anyway.

    1. It looks like footings for support columns? But I am extremely not an engineer, so will leave further determination to the experts.

      1. Fair enough. I only know the general “rules” not what any of this means.

        But hey, they’re “breaking ground” next year.

  2. …but in any case it could be ready for his sons debut!

    Thiago will be about 15 in 2027.

  3. I get they want to be in Miami proper, but what’s the problem with the new Lockhart Stadium besides a lack of suites?

    1. Fort Lauderdale (and really Broward County) views Miami in more-or-less the same way that Baltimore views Washington, that Oakland views San Francisco, and so on. They’re technically in the same market, but they’re two totally different cities and places.

    2. Well, that lack of suites is a big one. Also, just being associated with Miami makes the team more valuable and marketable, and actually having a Miami address only increases that.

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